The Coalition’s decision to press ahead with the project, taken in the 2010
Strategic Defence and Security Review, has only made matters worse

When the last government signed the contract to build two Queen Elizabeth-class aircraft carriers in 2007, the costs were estimated at £3.65 billion. This week, the Government is due to announce that the price has nearly doubled, to £6.2 billion. Such cost inflation has become depressingly normal with public-sector spending: witness the way in which the predicted price of the HS2 railway line has increased. Yet the story of the carriers is an especially sorry one.

The estimates of six years ago always seemed optimistic. It soon turned out that officials had made basic errors, such as failing to factor in VAT and inflation. It was not merely the value for money, but the wider strategy: at a time when defence budgets were under intense strain, could the nation really afford carriers which, with a planned displacement of 65,000 tonnes (the revised estimate is 70,600 tonnes), were more than three times the size of the Invincible-class ships – which served us so well in the Falklands and Iraq – that they were to replace?

The Coalition’s decision to press ahead with the project, taken in the 2010 Strategic Defence and Security Review, has only made matters worse. Thanks in large part to financial pressures, the original plan to equip the carriers with 72 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters (at an estimated cost of $100 million each, on top of the cost of the ships) has been drastically scaled back, to about half that number. A change of heart over whether the ships should be fitted with catapults and arrestor gear to give the fighters greater range not only incurred extra costs (around £74 million) but meant the programme will struggle to meet its deadline of having the first carrier operational by 2020 (as well as reducing inter-operability with the French military).

Philip Hammond, the Defence Secretary, says he wants to renegotiate the construction contracts, in the hope that the private sector can be persuaded to absorb some of the overrun. But even if he does succeed in controlling costs, neither he nor his military chiefs seem to have a clear idea of what we will actually do with the carriers. General Sir Nick Houghton, the new Chief of the Defence Staff, said in an interview yesterday that he wants the public to see the Armed Forces as the “go-to people” when there is a national crisis, whether it be striking firemen or foot-and-mouth, as well as retaining the capacity to intervene in failed states that become “terrorist heartlands”. Even though these carriers will give us an admirable ability to project power, it is hard to see them fulfilling either function. Let us hope that by the time they are built, we have a better idea of how to use them – and that the price has not risen still further.